56

I think of this as my “the part in Lord of the Rings where the light comes out of Minas Morgul and you know where everyone is, even though they’re not together” page. Seems like a good thing to do with all this jumping around.

One of the big challenges of making this strip is I really don’t want to explain anything. I don’t want to bog down the stories with stopping to tell you how technology works, what the social structure of the city is like, etc. And for whatever reason, I’ve resisted anyone narrating so far, so that’s off the table as an exposition device, too. That could change, but I prefer not to right now. At the same time, though, there’s a lot of things I could explain, and I worry that the comic is less clear if I don’t.

Here, for example, on page 56, I hope I’ve definitively shown how the wrist communicators work. They have rolled up tablets in them. They plug into the box inside. Simple functions like notifications are transferred to the wrist unit (They call them “boxes,” though no one actually did so in print before page 54), but for more complex tasks, they pop out the tablet. I did show Nav putting his tablet back in the box waaaay back on page 13, but at that time, there was no telling what that thing was, necessarily. I have pages and pages of info about this world and the people and things in it, and it’s a matter of figuring out where any of that can comfortably slide into the story.